8 Female Pop Art Artists Redefining The Genre

Since Pop Art debuted in the 1960s, it has remained one of the most recognizable styles of contemporary art. When it first started, Pop Art was primarily a male-dominated art movement, and female artists that participated in the genre were often marginalized and ignored. In fact, there were important women who also played an important part in the movement: Rosalyn Drexler, Evelyne Axell, or Elaine Sturevant are all celebrated female Pop artists during that period, but were largely unacknowledged and unrecognized. 

Today, Contemporary female Pop artists are redefining the movement and pushing the genre forward. They are recognized for their distinctive and unique artworks, characterized by a bright color palette, influence of mass-production, popular culture, and bold imagery. The Artling brings you a selection of  8 female contemporary artists who are making their mark in the genre of Pop Art. 

Ketna Patel

Ketna is a highly prolific British-Indian multi-media artist. Born in East Africa, educated in the UK, and based in South East Asia and India for the last twenty-five years, she uses her training in Design and Architecture to map observations gleaned from her compulsive travels onto an existentialist, yet to be defined new global anthropology that is fast emerging.

Having recently transplanted her studio from Singapore to two 'traveling studios' in the UK and India, she describes herself as being deeply tri-cultural; grounded in an evolving human identity beyond the rapidly evaporating boundaries of culture, nationality, and geography. Ketna’s artwork challenges our prejudices and pretensions about art, in much the same way that early Western Pop artists did.

“Using different cultures and historical events, I juxtapose mythological characters, Gods, Political icons, and the common man on the same canvas. This is a romance between the old and the new, once prohibited by stringent cultural, political, and class boundaries that have hemmed in most of us”.

Ye Hongxing

Ye Hongxing (叶红杏) is a Beijing-based artist, born in 1972 in Guangxi Province, China. One of the most relevant and successful stars of the contemporary Chinese art scene, Ye was previously selected as one of the top 20 contemporary Chinese artists by the curator of California’s Asia Art Museum and the director of Art Cologne. 

Working in oil paint, mixed media, sculpture, and installation, Ye’s works have been well-received internationally, especially her montaged sticker works that explode with animals, flora, and figures, or shape meditative Buddhist mandalas. Her works relish a sense of vivid, exquisite chaos, expressing a richness and luxury that combines bright hues with pop culture symbols and traditional motifs. Visually sublime scenes layer oppositions of tranquility and intricate frenzy, incorporating both realism and the visionary. Ye’s unique aesthetic continues to earn her popular acclaim worldwide.

Murni Mo Selle

Murni is a Singapore based multi-disciplinary visual artist and marketing and communications consultant. As a creative, she is known for her role as a VJ in the superclub called Ministry of Sound from 2006 to 2008, television productions from 2008 to 2012, and later in the advertising agencies creating award-winning campaigns. Her authentic self is still attached to the arts, so the decision to create again is empirical to maintaining a sense of self and purpose. As a social activist, her practice incorporates intersecting layers of different media: film, sound, photography, and digital. Her current works explore issues of the social divide, identity, gender, eco-consciousness, and the protection of indigenous tribes.

Shin Young Park

Shin-Young is a Korean-born New Zealander, who moved to Auckland in 1991 with her family. She completed her Bachelor degree in1998 and Master degree in 2003 in Fine Arts at the Elam School of Fine Art at the University of Auckland. After having several solo shows and group shows in Auckland, Park moved to Singapore in 2006. Park continues to showcase her print works through art galleries in Singapore, participate in several group shows, overseas exchange shows, art fairs, workshops, international residency programs, and charity auctions.

Her works portray the fast-paced and digitalized society where everything is constantly changing - Through overlaid imageries and vivid graphics of Singapore, Shin-Young captures its distinctive culture and dynamic lifestyle: diverse but not divided, busy yet ordinary. 

Margot Shin

Margot is an emerging artist who hails from Seoul in South Korea. Her practice is predominantly executed through acrylic on canvas, with subjects varying across her works. A strong understanding of form and colour allows her to manoeuvre  her way through her canvases that depict anything from interpretations of sports to geometric structures. These works evoke subtle feelings of serenity, yet engages with a light-hearted exuberance.

Aleeloulalei

Alicia Lee (Aleeloulalei) is a Singapore-based illustrator and graphic designer. She takes pride in her experimentations with different techniques of image-making and is currently working with bubble wrap as a base for her artworks. She firmly believes in the importance of the creative process and makes it a habit to document every step in all her projects.

Alicia plays on the tactility of the medium of bubble wrap, a stylized Braille script, and the temptation a viewer might experience in coyly touching the piece in a gallery setting. Her work is inspired by iconic artists, celebrities, and musicians.

Chila Kumari Burman

For more than twenty years, visual artist Chila has worked experimentally making brightly-hued genre-defying prints collage, mixed media, paint, and photography with a predominantly autobiographical focus. Burman explores the construction of classed, gendered, sexualised and ‘raced’ subjectivities. 

Having received a B.A 1st class Hons in Printmaking from Leeds Polytechnic and an MA in Fine Art at the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art, Burman generates powerful works of contemporary Asian feminism. Informed by bold colour, form, and line with direction from street politics, graffiti, Hindi film, fashion, and found objects, the artist has confirmed her status as a leading figure among UK Black and Asian artists with her work being exhibited globally.

Dina Gadia

The works of Dina (b.1986) are imaginative subversions of cultural codes, featuring collaged realities and altered bodies that bespeak of gender issues and sexuality, taste and identity, of the official and the outsider, fine art and lowbrow culture, authorship and subjectivity, all done with a touch of whimsy and a sense of wonder for everything strange and absurd. Dina’s approach to her practice involves deft handling of cut-up elements disposed of in unorthodox settings, which brings about the distortion and detournement of its content into areas of discomfiting subject matter, probing areas previously unrecognized yet perceptive of sociological and psychological matters that tread on the path of the political.

Notably, in most works, found text ambiguously loaded with significance are combined with appropriated images selected from pulp magazines of a certain milieu, resonating larger localized contexts and its people, which can yield unsettling relationships with regard to postcolonial attitudes, the view and treatment of women, and the contested boundaries of taste and class issues that unveil disparate economic realities. Most often these jarring juxtapositions are imbued with humor, surprisingly, like a Freudian slip that unleashes the unwanted in a witty but exact manner. Humor consequently in her work becomes a reliable weapon in discharging cultural anxieties. Not only are visual puns generated through physical or formal incongruences in a comedic cycle of errors – by way of pictorial proportion, composition, gesture, and expression, but also through a deadpan narration of the impossible yet true - all portrayed vividly in an ironic manner. Gadia’s paintings remarkably capture the tone of the cryptic angsts and uncertainties of her subject matter, the lost and inchoate expressions of an oblivious community, applying a touch that is removed from sentimentality or self-righteous judgment. In doing so, the artist employs tropes of illustration and design to remove the proverbial weight of the author’s hand, a post-modern resolve that Gadia has mastered.
 

A fan of Pop Art? Why not check out our curated selection of Pop art artworks on The Artling?